How to Care for Your Email List
Your email list is like a gem that must be polished often in order to retain its luster and brilliance. Unless you properly nurture your list, it will become inactive and stale, resulting in poor open rates and fewer subscribers.
That said, here are a few list management tips to keep your email garden free of growth-stunting weeds. Ahh, the poetry of email marketing.
- Add new email addresses as soon as you get them, and do everything you can to keep building your list. Include a "forward to a friend" button, and post sign-up forms on your website and anywhere else you have a web presence. Keep a sign-up sheet in your office and ask people personally if they'd like to receive your newsletter. Each new address represents a potential long-term customer.
- Remove duplicate and invalid addresses--MyNewsletterBuilder does this for you automatically. Bad addresses can throw off campaign statistics, causing you to miscalculate the overall effectiveness of a mailing.
- Don't remove soft bounces the first time around. Your email could be undeliverable because a server was down or the recipient's inbox was full. Give it 3-4 mailings before removing the address permanently.
- Don't make your company appear careless and incompetent by misspelling a recipient's name.
- Segment your email list so you're sending relevant content to targeted sub-lists. Divide recipients into categories, ie., prospective customers, existing customers, people who've purchased within the past 6 months, etc. Apply your message to whatever recent interaction your company has had with that recipient. That way, you relate directly to that person and give them content they're likely to respond to.
- If you have multiple email marketing campaigns going to multiple lists, don't mis-target your messages. Make sure the right campaigns are going to the right lists.